Sexual Identity, sexual fluidity and The Matrix

Rolling Stone : The Mystery of Larry Wachowski:

"One night in January 2001, Larry Wachowski, co-director of the blockbuster Matrix movies, walked into a dark club in West Hollywood, where the rules of identity easily blurred, just like in his films. The Dungeon served the devoted BDSM -- bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism -- community in Los Angeles.

...In the weeks following their first encounter, Larry Wachowski returned to the Dungeon to see Mistress Strix. Boundaries fell swiftly, stunning the Los Angeles bondage community, which prides itself on the fact that mistresses keep their submissives at arm's length. The relationship between Larry and Ilsa, both in their thirties, would eventually destroy two marriages and possibly alter the creative course of one of the most influential movie trilogies of the past quarter-century...

..."Larry is a cross-dresser, and his wife was not comfortable with him dressing as a woman. I trusted Larry to be just a client, and Ilsa to be just a dominatrix." Sources in the Los Angeles BDSM community say Ilsa Strix was not the first "pro dom" that Larry Wachowski visited.

Psychiatrists disagree about what forces are at work in men who cross-dress and take the ultimate step of having gender-reassignment surgery. One camp considers men of this type to have a "gender-identity disorder," to be "women trapped in men's bodies." In recent years, another group of doctors labeled some men who demonstrate these tendencies to be autogynephiles -- straight men who are essentially sexual fetishists, aroused by the thought or image of themselves as women.

...At the Cannes Film Festival that year, when Larry and Ilsa appeared together on the red carpet, Ilsa looked stunning, like a movie star -- perfect skin, blond hair falling to her shoulders, white teeth gleaming. Larry Wachowski did not look like Larry Wachowski. His face looked feminized; his eyebrows were plucked, he wore large teardrop earrings, and a knit cap covered his head. His fingernails were manicured. Both Larry and Ilsa seemed ecstatic. The press, including columnist Liz Smith, reported that Larry might be taking female hormones, in anticipation of sex-change surgery."